'Scarborough 11' File Federal Complaint Against Harford

Patrick Raycraft

"Love still makes a family," says Josh Blanchfield (at left) at a press conference at Hartford City Hall on Wednesday afternoon. Blanchfield serves as the spokesperson and Peter Goselin (at right) serves as the attorney for the 11 residents who live at 68 Scarborough in Hartford.

"Love still makes a family," says Josh Blanchfield (at left) at a press conference at Hartford City Hall on Wednesday afternoon. Blanchfield serves as the spokesperson and Peter Goselin (at right) serves as the attorney for the 11 residents who live at 68 Scarborough in Hartford. (Patrick Raycraft)

HARTFORD — The zoning fight that has engulfed a wealthy West End neighborhood escalated Wednesday as the "Scarborough 11" launched a constitutional challenge to the city's definition of family.

In a complaint filed in federal district court Wednesday, the eight adults who live in a Scarborough Street mansion said they are part of a functional, taxpaying household that includes three children, but that Hartford's zoning laws forbid them from living together.

"This issue of the government deciding who is a legitimate family and who is illegitimate is unacceptable to us," said Joshua Blanchfield, a Hartford public school teacher who lives in the nine-bedroom home with his wife and two children.

The plaintiffs said the city's refusal to accept them as a family and efforts to evict some of the occupants violate their rights under the state and federal constitutions, including a right to privacy and personal autonomy under the Fourteenth Amendment. They are seeking damages for legal fees and "pain, suffering and emotional distress."

The city did not return a request for comment by Wednesday night.

Peter Goselin, an attorney representing the Scarborough group, argued that the city's "antiquated" zoning code encroaches on his clients' freedom to live as a family and raise children together through a partnership among longtime friends.

"This is an important right that is part of a long American tradition of extended families, part of a long American tradition of cooperative and collective living arrangements, something that goes all the way back to the Iroquois Nation, even before there was a United States," Goselin said.

A central question they are raising: Does the government have the right to decide what constitutes a family in a modern world?

"The city that we love is breaking our heart," Blanchfield said during a press conference at city hall. "And so we have been left with no choice. From the start we've only wanted to live in peace."

Wednesday's announcement came a day after the city filed suit against Laura Rozza and Simon DeSantis, two residents listed as the property owners of 68 Scarborough.

After issuing a cease-and-desist notice in October — an order upheld by Hartford's zoning board of appeals on Feb. 17 — the city said the 11-person household has continued to defy zoning laws that define family members as those related by blood, marriage, civil union or adoption.

The Scarborough Street area's single-family zoning restricts the number of unrelated residents in a home to two people. However, the city's decades-old definition of family permits an unlimited number of live-in domestic servants.

The city has requested a court ruling to collect civil penalties and enforce the cease-and-desist order, which calls on Rozza and DeSantis to remove the "additional families" in the home.

"The time for compliance has passed," the city states in its lawsuit.

Goselin said his clients will also ask a federal judge for a temporary injunction to postpone enforcement by the city. So far, friends and strangers have donated more than $5,000 through a crowdfunding website to support the group's legal fund.

Several of the residents at 68 Scarborough had previously lived together before deciding as a group to buy the 1921 brick home last summer for $453,000 and sink $30,000 in repairs and improvements, they said. They have a shared bank account, eat dinner together and have family meetings.

"In addition to the financial and practical aspects of their living arrangement, the plaintiffs also feel themselves connected to each other by strong bonds of solidarity," the complaint states.

The press conference drew supporters who chastised the city for pursuing enforcement and said the "Scarborough 11" meets their personal view of what constitutes a family.

Richard Kay, a constitutional law professor at UConn School of Law, said the courts would not decide that family question "in the abstract," but in the context of Hartford's zoning code enforcement and the specific details of the case.

"If we're going to extend the family out of blood, marriage and adoption, and foster children in some places, then these guys, on the facts, have a pretty good claim," Kay said after reading the complaint. "To the extent that love makes a family, as they like to say, they have demonstrated that they have a common history. So I can see a court saying, 'This is family for these purposes.'

"But the federal law now has not yet gone that far ... deciding that unrelated people can be a family entitled to constitutional protection in this context."

In 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Long Island village of Belle Terre, N.Y., which, like Hartford's R-8 zoning district, forbid more than two unrelated people from residing in a single-family home.

That case involved six college students who were leasing a house — an arrangement that Belle Terre said would affect the community's quiet, traditional character. A coalition of Scarborough Street neighbors have made a similar argument in its push for the city to protect the single-family zoning.

In a dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall argued that Belle Terre's ordinance — which, he pointed out, allowed an unlimited number of relatives to live in a house — "unnecessarily burdens" the students' constitutional rights to privacy and First Amendment freedom of association.

Zoning officials, Marshall wrote in 1974, should be rightly concerned with land-use issues such as "the number and kind of dwellings to be constructed in a certain neighborhood or the number of persons who can reside in those dwellings. But zoning authorities cannot validly consider who those persons are, what they believe, or how they choose to live, whether they are Negro or white, Catholic or Jew, Republican or Democrat, married or unmarried."

John Nolon, a professor of law at Pace University Law School, said the Hartford zoning rules would be illegal in New York these days. In the 1980s, New York state's court of appeals held that there is no land-use reason — for example, trying to curb neighborhood traffic and noise — that justifies restricting the definition of family to those who are biologically or legally related.

"The court in New York state could not find any rationale, based upon land-use impacts, for discriminating between a large family related by blood, marriage and adoption, and a large family of unrelated people," said Nolon, counsel for Pace Law School's Land Use Law Center.

Each family is presumably "taking meals together and using the unit the way it was designed, which is the single kitchen, a bunch of bedrooms and bathrooms, with a common gathering area," Nolon said. "There's the same number of toilet flushes, the same number of cars ... There's probably the same wear and tear on the neighborhood."

Hartford is not alone in restricting who can live in single-family homes. But neighboring towns and other cities in Connecticut are more permissive about the number of unrelated people that can be considered family, with Bridgeport, Danbury, New Haven and Stamford allowing up to four unrelated residents in a home, Hartford planning and zoning Chairwoman Sara Bronin said in a February memo.

West Hartford permits up to three unrelated people, and Bloomfield, Newington and Windsor allow five. In East Hartford and Wethersfield, there is no limit to the number of unrelated individuals who can live together as a family, said Bronin, a UConn law professor who specializes in land-use issues.

"The key weakness of Hartford's approach to functional families, in my view, is the limitation on the number of unrelated adults to two," Bronin wrote. "To some, it might seem difficult to justify limiting the number of unrelated adults to two when we allow an unlimited number of servants."

Bronin later said that her memo was an attempt to address "inconsistencies" in the Hartford code, not "the issue of constitutionality."